Edinburgh

The English were back in the castle by 1335, and the Scots retook it in 1341 by another ruse: William Douglas of Liddesdale and his men got in disguised as merchants from Leith bringing supplies to the garrison. With Berwick in English hands, much of Scotland's export trade in wool and hides now passed through Edinburgh and Leith, and around 1365 Froissart could already call this town of some 400 houses the capital of Scotland. The Stewart kings made their home at Holyrood, where James II was born, crowned, married and buried.

Hemmed in by its walls, the town grew upward. After the disaster at Flodden in 1513 the burgesses raised a new wall, and inside it houses of eleven storeys or more crowded the narrow closes off the High Street. The court left with James VI for London in 1603, and the old town stayed packed on its ridge until 1767, when the New Town began to rise north of the Nor Loch; in those Enlightenment years David Hume and Adam Smith made the old capital's name known across Europe.